Sing Down the Stars (The Celestine Series Book 1)

by L. J. Hatton

  I whipped the wind into a frenzy, pulling the bits of rock and soil along with the dandelion fluff from the Aerie into a whirlwind.

  “Fall,” I told the stars. Fall. Break. Shatter and ruin.

  And so came the true test. Could I pull down heaven while holding up earth and sky?

  I tasted blood in my mouth from the strain, but grasped that invisible line between me and the stars, and pulled it taut. The increase in power, which had manifested when Klok dissolved the restriction bands, was there and flowing, setting the sky ablaze as one burning stone after another broke through the higher clouds. Destruction dripped from my fingers.

  I brought the rain.

  The Commission ships never saw it coming.

  The first hit was direct, smashing the lead vessel in the side and making my ears ring. Smaller stones caught the exoskin of another, turning it to cinders so the skeleton peeled away toward the Earth.

  Another ship’s engines stalled out, the fan blades spitting mulch like a lawn mower.

  “I bet Circus Boy can’t do that,” Birch said, smirking at Jermay.

  By now the remaining ships were retreating, but I didn’t tell the stars to stop until my arms grew heavy and my head fell forward, dropping against the feathers on Xerxes’ neck. Jermay caught me like I knew he would, because he’d never let me fall.

  The Show was dead, but the legacy of Magnus Roma lived on. I could only hope I wouldn’t come to regret it.

  CHAPTER 45

  If something goes wrong, get to the Hollow . . .

  Things had definitely gone wrong, and there was nowhere else I could think to go.

  The others scanned the area around us, confusion on their faces, but only Jermay spoke.

  “I don’t see any houses.”

  There were no houses, not even a hovel or a hole in the ground. Only someone who had been told what to look for could find it: three trees in a line that looked like burnt-out husks, with branches that tangled into an arch above them, and white rocks arranged in a star twenty long steps in the opposite direction.

  My father had drawn what he called “the doorway” and made me memorize it as a child—then he threw the paper into the fire when I asked if I could keep it.

  “We have to find the markers to know where the door is,” Anise said. “They’re farther in.”

  We had to shrink the golems so that they’d fit between the trees. A few paces into the woods, Jermay let go of my hand and started running.

  “Oh no.” The words came out a choking sob from my mouth, Anise’s, and Winnie’s all at once.

  There was a pile of rock with stones carefully laid and fitted together into a low mound. A worn top hat sat at one end, waiting for its owner to reclaim it. Not the kind of marker any of us wanted to see.

  “Zavel?” Birdie sniffled into Klok’s side.

  Jermay was on his hands and knees, head bowed and crying.

  I knelt beside the grave and placed my hand against the stones.

  “I guess it’s not really a surprise, is it?” Jermay asked, after a few minutes.

  “Yes, it is,” I said, and cried with him.

  How long had it been since we set out believing that the Hollow would keep us safe?

  We did our part—we got here. We’d nearly killed ourselves to do it. We should have been safe. That was the promise my father made us all: So long as Magnus Roma lived, those counted as his would be protected.

  He was either a failure, a liar, or a corpse, so what did that make his daughters?

  Jermay sat back and crossed his legs, staring at the grave.

  “Do you think he made it to my mother?” he asked. “He’ll be heartbroken if he didn’t.”

  “I’m sure he did,” I said.

  “We need to get inside,” Winnie urged softly. “I’m sorry, but it’s not safe out here.”

  Jermay nodded and stood up, taking my hand again.

  No one touched the top hat.

  Anise found the tree with our father’s mark carved into the trunk. This was the door to the Hollow, covered in chipped wood laid a layer at a time, to match the pattern of the trees around it.

  She slid her hand up into the branches to flip the lock latch; the trunk swung open, wide enough for us to squeeze inside. A narrow flight of stairs took us down into the Hollow itself. Jermay was still holding my hand.

  The door slammed behind us, cutting off the light we’d had from the moon.

  “I don’t like it in here,” Birdie said, crowding close. She’d picked Xerxes up like a teddy bear, and his beak was digging into my back.

  I let my fingers skim the walls as we went down, just to make sure they hadn’t vanished. Klok held up his hand so it shined like a lantern, but the darkness was as thick as a solid curtain.

  “They’ve moved on,” Anise said.

  The place was deserted, and had been long enough for dust to collect on the tables and chairs. Someone had stayed to bury the dead, but they’d given up on us. Or they’d had to flee. Either way, there was no one left.

  “Where are you going?” Anise asked when I walked away from everyone else, but I couldn’t say.

  I had thought I was going home, but this was another tomb.

  I was born under an impossible sky.

  It was only an eclipse, but my father called it impossible. He said my mother watched the night shake the sun from the middle of the day, and went into labor on the spot. She took it as an ill omen, and her hopes for me died before I drew breath. I believe that was the moment she began to die as well, though I never told my father. He would have denied it, but I always wondered if he would have secretly agreed with me.

  Now I stood in front of an open, dusty wardrobe in what should have been my parents’ room, trying to imagine how my mother had looked in the clothes still hanging from the pegs, and if she’d ever wanted more than the life my father had carved out of the ground to hide her and my sisters while he could. Would the woman who wore these T-shirts and jeans have approved of life aboard the train?

  I pulled at my bloodstained gown, cutting the seams with a pocketknife I found on a shelf. Its weight had become unbearable.

  I put on my mother’s jeans, then reached for a shirt that had belonged to my father. There were only two; the first had succumbed to moths and time and came apart in my hands, so the yellow one it was. I clipped my hair up off my neck to feel a bit more like myself. Short-haired Penn in her father’s clothes.

  Sliding my hands into my pockets was something I’d done when I played my brother’s part. It kept my hands hidden, so no one could tell how small they were. I did the same thing there in my parents’ room, but my mother’s pockets weren’t empty. One had a folded-up card inside. My name was on the envelope.

  I opened it to find a cheap “Happy Birthday” greeting with an embossed “16” and a glitter-covered cake. Inside was a note in my father’s block handwriting:

  HELLO, PENN . . . PENELOPE. I SWORE NEVER TO BURDEN YOU WITH THIS IF I WAS ABLE TO CONCEAL IT, SO IT’S A GIVEN THAT I’M NOT THERE WITH YOU AS YOU READ THIS.

  Tears blurred my eyes, making me glad that I was alone as I read.

  I’M BOTH HAPPY AND SAD TO KNOW YOU’VE MADE IT SAFELY HERE. SAD FOR KNOWING I HAVEN’T ACCOMPLISHED IN THE LAST SIXTEEN YEARS WHAT I SWORE I WOULD FIND A WAY TO DO, AND SAD THAT MY REGRETS HAVE BECOME YOUR BURDENS. BUT THERE IS ALSO HOPE. YOU’RE STRONG ENOUGH TO SURVIVE WITHOUT ME.

  My survival had less to do with my strength than it did with the good fortune of having made the trip with the others. I had less confidence in my abilities than my father did.

  I HOPE YOUR SISTERS ARE WITH YOU, BUT I KNOW THAT ANY OR ALL OF THEM WOULD HAVE GIVEN EVERYTHING TO PROTECT YOU AND OUR FAMILY. DON’T MOURN THE SHOW, PENN. IT WAS ALWAYS AN ILLUSION ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE. ONLY THE PEOPLE WERE R
EAL. EVEN THE ONES WHO NEVER LOOKED HUMAN.

  I flipped the paper over to read the other side, but there was no explanation of what he meant by that.

  IF YOU’RE HERE, AND I AM NOT, THEN I’VE MISSED YOUR BIRTHDAY. I OWE YOU SO MUCH, MAINLY APOLOGIES, BUT THERE’S NO TIME TO GIVE YOU THOSE. SO INSTEAD, I LEAVE YOU THIS—THE GIFT OF TRUTH. USE IT WISELY.

  LOVE, PAPA

  Below that was a micro memory chip that I had no way to play, but I was fairly certain Klok could. I didn’t know how long the envelope and card had been in that pocket, but the memory chip looked new, and the tape holding it on the paper was still sticky. If he placed the card here when he left us and the train, he’d been alive as recently as a month ago. That was the only truth I needed.

  His voice had sounded somber in my head. I was afraid to open the files on that chip and find out why. If he meant to tell me about the dark deal he’d struck with Warden Nye, I was in no mood to hear it, so I put the card back in my pocket and began walking from one room to another, touching keepsakes I didn’t remember.

  There were carved wooden fish for Nim to make float and strands of wind chimes strung throughout a room for Vesper. Evie’s dresses and playthings lay in drawers as though my parents had gathered up their children and fled, leaving it all behind as unimportant.

  At the end of the hall, one door was partially closed. Curious, I pressed against the handle, and it swung open before I realized where I was standing. This was the nursery meant for me and the brother whose name had never been uttered because it was bad luck to speak of the dead.

  That grave chill returned, but worse, forming a wall I would have to breach if I wanted to go inside. Toys and books occupied sparse shelves, not quite so neat as the other rooms. Something had dislodged them, and a few had fallen into a pile on the floor. I bent, meaning to stretch my hand through the doorway and take one. There had been no trace of a scent on the clothes in the other rooms, nothing to say that someone else had ever touched them. I hoped I’d find something to prove the Hollow hadn’t always felt like a crypt.

  “They called him Nico,” Anise said. I hadn’t heard her approach. Her dark eyes glinted in the light like the sharpened point of a knife, and they cut just as deep.

  “I thought he died before they had a chance to name him.”

  My brother hadn’t seemed quite real as an unnamed entity. He’d been more dream than ghost, but a name added weight. I’d killed a real person rather than the idea of one.

  Penelope killed Nico. Penn killed Penelope. Now Nico had killed Penn. His face should have been below the top hat, not mine, and not another day would pass without me knowing that.

  “Your names were picked out weeks before you were born,” Anise said. “I’ll take it as a technicality that Papa’s unavailable to argue with me—you deserve to know.”

  She leaned into the door frame, not entering any farther than I had, arms crossed, but not in anger.

  “It’s just a room, Penn. One that’s yours. This whole house is yours as much as it is mine. It’s your—”

  “Don’t say home.”

  “It is your home.”

  “Which I destroyed.”

  Just like I destroyed The Show, which was the only home that mattered to me.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “And Papa should never have let you think you did. I shouldn’t have stayed quiet when I knew better.” She braced my shoulders. “You were an infant, Penn. What happened, happened, but you can’t take the blame for your born nature, nor are you responsible for dark deeds done by others in your name. What happened to the train is not your fault.”

  I shattered.

  I’d held myself up so long without even realizing I wanted to hear someone say exactly that. I’d needed to hear someone say it; that was the only way it would ever be true.

  Days’ worth of exhaustion, and years’ worth of guilt, churned up like the froth below a waterfall. I collapsed against my sister, hanging on with both hands. She’d managed to find soap enough for a shower, which mixed with the scent of earth that came from her skin and chased the darkness away.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I asked her.

  “Nothing. All of the wrongs around you are coming from outside.”

  “But I raised Medusae, Anise. Me. By myself. No one did that to me or for me. It has to mean something.”

  “It means that you are exactly as singular as Papa believed you to be.”

  All of the questions about our father and what he knew of my true abilities rushed to my mouth, only to tangle at the back of my tongue with questions about what he knew of Winnie and Greyor and Birdie. What did he know about Nye or Nagendra’s past with the Commission? What did Anise know besides my brother’s name? It should have been easy to ask her, but in the moment, it was more difficult than escaping the Center. So I let go of her and kept quiet, certain that she’d be there when I was ready to ask her everything.

  “It’s just a room, Penn,” she said again. “There’s no reason not to go inside, especially to avoid ghosts that do not haunt it.”

  Anise pushed off the door frame and left me to myself.

  I stood at the door to my nursery for more long minutes and half-held breaths, putting my foot forward, only to draw it back and start over. Finally, I stepped across what had seemed an impenetrable barrier of open air.

  The rug was full of dust, dulling the colors. Small clothes sat folded on wooden cabinets beside a music box. No blue or pink on either of the cribs, nothing to suggest male or female even in a place that should have been safe from the Commission’s sight. When I opened the music box, it played a song I wished I could remember. There was a picture inside of a woman with long, dark hair and eyes like all of my sisters, except Evie. I tucked the photograph into my pocket and closed the door behind me when I left.

  Eventually, I found my way back to the kitchen, and the others. Somebody had scavenged up something to eat. From the amount of greens, it was probably Birch. I took a seat on the bench beside Jermay, trying not to notice how the surface around his plate was old and scarred, gouged with deep lines, and blackened by fire. This was where my brother died. There’d been no ghosts in the nursery because they were all waiting for me in the kitchen.

  I reached toward one of the marks, and an infant’s wail filled my ears. The image of my mother’s face twisted from the perfection of her photograph to anguished eyes and the death mask expression Iva took on when she shut down for good. I pulled my hand back just before my fingers grazed the table, sure that it would burn me if I touched it.

  “Are you okay?” Jermay asked.

  “I’m better off than most,” I said. I had no right to complain when things could have been much worse.

  How many of the recruits from the Center never made it out? How many had families who would be crying over their graves the way we were mourning Zavel? What had the Commission done to Sister Mary Alban?

  I wished I had a candle to light. The Hollow needed more good thoughts to paint the ceiling with their smoke. I needed a few myself.

  “What do we do now?” Birch asked. “They’ll be looking for us.”

  “I want my papa,” Birdie cried.

  I wanted mine, too.

  “We’ll find him,” Anise said.

  “How?” Jermay asked. “Magnus said to come here, but he never told us what to do if here wasn’t an option.”

  “I know a place,” Winnie said. “I wouldn’t call it safe, but the Commission won’t be there.”

  Slowly, and without a spoken word, we all agreed. Safe had become more abstract in the last weeks. Maybe the safest place for us was one where the Commission was afraid to go—that possibility terrified me.

  Winnie and Birch started packing our things while Klok saw to Xerxes and Bijou. Once I could get Klok alone, I’d ask him about the memory
chip I’d found. Maybe I’d ask Anise, too, and see if their stories were the same. Klok wasn’t capable of lying, as far as I knew, but I wasn’t sure about anyone else, anymore.

  “I’ll clear the kitchen,” I said.

  “Do you want help?” Jermay asked, but I shook my head. As usual, he seemed to understand when I needed space, and he drifted off with Birdie.

  I took out the photograph of my mother. Iva Roma smiled up at me, and in her eyes was the warmth I’d seen in my father’s re-creation just before she was stolen from me. It was too painful. I let the paper fall into the flames and catch, crumbling away a piece at a time until there was nothing left but ash on the wind.

  I lifted the kettle that Klok had used to fix our dinner and set it off the fire. I should have poured it out, let the water soak the flames into the dirt floor, but I stood there—just watching. The scent of simmered greens turned clean and crisp with the salted bite of sea air; the bubbles that had died away without heat began to boil again. My shimmering sailfish burst through the bubbles into the air.

  I turned my attention to the ground; a tremor below the surface drummed out a timpani beat at my feet. Grains of sand formed a sturdy paw, with shards of broken stone for claws. Behind them a tufted wildcat sprang up and slashed at the fish before a swirling breeze sent the golem sifting back to the earth that had birthed it.

  I crouched and held my hand over the flames until I knew I should have felt them. Instead I closed my hand and drew the flames up off the logs so they shined from the ends of my fingers.

  Strange as the idea seemed, the best advice had come from Warden Nye: Do your worst.

  A flick of my wrist created a bird made entirely of fire that perched in my palm. I blew across it the way I’d seen Evie do a thousand times, and the flaming golem burst into embers, without a trace left behind.

  “Ready?” Jermay asked, popping his head back into the kitchen.

  I nodded.

  For now, I’d go with the others. I’d find my sisters and my father. I’d get my answers. And then the Commission would burn.